Film Reviews by Steve

Still the biggest box office hit ever, adjusted for inflation, David Selznick's blockbuster is the ultimate Hollywood production of the studio era. It's a faithful adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's bestseller about the US Civil War and the epic romance between tempestuous southern belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and rakish soldier of fortune Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).

It's a spectacular landmark, though flawed. Scarlett survives the burning of Atlanta, but the film doesn't, and the second half is episodic and repetitive. There's a birth or serious accident or death along every five minutes like a speeded up soap opera. Characters change and then forget they've changed. The portrayal of the slaves is heartbreaking and unforgivably cruel.

Max Steiner's score carries the later scenes. Otherwise it's the performances that keep the film alive. Scarlett is an absurd archetype, but Vivien Leigh just about makes her credible over four hours through sheer star willpower. Gable has little to do other than twinkle roguishly but Hattie McDaniel and Olivia de Havilland at least make you care.

The troubled pre-production shows. There were many writers and three directors. Politically, it is hard to stomach. Towards the end it is strongly implied that Rhett and a few male cohorts join the Ku Klux Klan! Now the material is controversial it is promoted as an opportunity to reflect on the values of a vanished civilisation. But that's too much to ask.

Based on a scandalous true story about the murder of a woman by her aristocratic husband, which got entangled in the 1848 revolution in France. Bette Davis plays the notorious Henriette D-, the governess to their children, rumoured to be having an affair with the Duc (Charles Boyer). Warner Brothers intended this to be a rare sympathetic role for their star.

It doesn't entirely work that way. The neurotic wife (Barbara O’Neil) goes crazy with jealousy over the impeccable Henriette, but the tutor does actually entirely take over the household and win the love of the husband, even if they don't share a kiss. Bette captures the eye and Boyer is compelling. And there is chemistry. O’Neil was Oscar nominated but overacts horribly.

There's a large budget. This is a visual banquet; a sumptuous recreation of the interiors and costumes of Restoration Paris. Colour would have been nice. Like many productions intent on touring you around the scenery, it is a little slow, stiff and formal.

Much of its long running time is spent watching the acting talents of many Hollywood kids. This appeal is very much to taste; for me this ranks with religious awe as the stickiest feature of classic cinema. Especially when one of the moppets gets sick. It's not the best of Bette's melodramas for Warners, but there's a fine score from Max Steiner and those first rate production values.

An insight into the lives of rich sophisticates in ’30s California; mainly a celebrated and entitled -but alcoholic- lawyer (Lionel Barrymore) and his reckless, free spirited daughter (Norma Shearer). It is interesting that with fascism gaining influence in the US and Europe, MGM gave us heroes who see themselves as above the law and normal morality.

Lionel gets a prohibition gangster (Clark Gable) off a murder rap while Norma falls in love with him, and his expensive lifestyle. And if that already looks an impressive cast, there's Leslie Howard second billed as a well-heeled polo celebrity. They stand around expensive apartments in swanky clothes (by Adrian) drinking cocktails as their laissez faire decadence reaps a whirlwind.

Barrymore won the best actor Oscar and Shearer was nominated, which is a bit of a stretch. These are mannered performances. Much of the problem is the direction of Clarence Brown who abandons his stars to lengthy long or medium shots, like figures on a stage. Brown also got nominated and he became a star director of soaps at MGM.

The main interest in this today is to see Shearer, a huge star of early talkies, plus the frivolous precode hedonism. It opens with a discussion of Norma's scanty lingerie! The writing is unpolished, the sound is poor and it has a flat, uninteresting look. But it's fascinating to hear what Hollywood was talking about before the censors took charge.  

Marlene Dietrich wrote the plot outline in an attempt to broaden her exotic appeal. She's still a cabaret singer. And she meets her husband (Herbert Marshall) while she's swimming naked in a lake in Germany... but then the narrative diverts towards a more conventional Hollywood soap with the star suffering poverty and disgrace while struggling to provide for their son alone.

The best (and most famous) scene is a nightclub routine with Marlene in a gorilla costume. She removes the disguise to sing the excellent 'Hot Voodoo'. But the glamour and the naturalism clash. Dietrich complained the box office was undermined by censorship and it's possible to imagine her descent into the gutter may have been planned as more realistically brutal.

Josef von Sternberg wasn't a director for social realism though. When his star is compelled to live in a flophouse, he creates the most beautifully lit flophouse in cinema. The milieu is exotically sleazy. Marlene does a lot more acting than usual, rather than a model for von Sternberg's adoring lens.

Pre-stardom Cary Grant plays an unlikely gangster! Sidney Toler is fine in a cameo as a sordid detective. It's a curiosity. No one else walks on the wild side with Marlene's insouciance, but it just doesn't compute when she’s forced to wash dishes. That's what Lillian Gish does in a Griffith film, not Dietrich in a von Sternberg. It's an interesting diversion but only intermittently successful.

Bette Davis didn't get an Oscar nomination for her sensation in Of Human Bondage and it seems standard to assume that a year later, the Academy gave her the award for Dangerous to make up for the oversight. But this scenario ignores that Claudette Colbert deserved her win for It Happened One Night, and that Bette is pretty good in this.

There are signs it was jigged to give the audience a few echoes of her star-making role. But her character is completely different; an intelligent and celebrated stage actor who has fallen on hard times and alcoholism but finds a way back through the support of Franchot Tone's principled, wealthy architect/playboy.

It's melodrama and there are many sacrifices made before the cast manoeuvres towards a conclusion acceptable to the Production Code. This hasn't the prestige of a Somerset Maugham adaptation. The plot is clumsy, though there’s a witty script. The direction is dreadful, but this is Warner Brothers and there's enough talent on board to compensate.

Bette is fabulous and makes the standard situations a lot of fun. Including when she manipulates the engaged Franchot to kiss her in a thunderstorm. She is the sort of predatory girl you don't leave alone with your man! Her solution to an inconvenient marriage is to accelerate herself and her husband into a tree and see who survives! It's that crazy. And it's that irresistible.

Handsome adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about Germany after WWI, and the pacifism which gives way to poverty and the emergence of the Nazis. Three young men return from the western front to rebuild the nation but find themselves swept up in the rising tide of a new tyranny. Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young share a palpable rapport as the friends.

Taylor falls for a penniless aristocrat played by Margaret Sullavan. She has a strong screen presence; slim, poised, husky and cool. And looks elegant in a beret. Frank Borzage turns their relationship into the ethereal hyper-romance which was his speciality. The normally lightweight Franchot Tone brings gravitas in support, with perhaps his best performance.

This has the only screenwriting credit of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sullavan complained she couldn't speak his dialogue so it was rewritten by the producer, Joe Mankiewicz. These difficulties are not apparent; the script has poetry and depth. There is some editorialising. The censors wanted the bad guys to be communists, not fascists! But Borzage held firm!

Still the politics is vague for 1938. It's a pacifist story set in a studio's idea of middle Europe. Today it works best as a lyrical romance; a Borzage picture, full of atmosphere and suffering. Sullavan's death in a sanitarium is protracted but gives the film a mythic weight. It's a weepie, but a relatively sophisticated one.

The 1920s was the decade of jazz and Anything Goes, and the films of DW Griffith and Lillian Gish started to go out of fashion, with their Victorian moralising and sentimental melodrama. Gish was succeeded by urban jazz babes like Clara Bow and the austere exoticism of Greta Garbo. This is set on a farm in rural America.

But 100 years on, Griffith and Gish's films still live. This is partly because Griffith was a fine director and particularly talented at creating suspense though his editing. He always kept the drama in the frame. And he makes the most of Gish's wan beauty, with her huge eyes bathed in gauzy light in the long close ups.

And Gish is a fine actor. More naturalistic performers emerged in later silents, but she is very affecting here, telling the story through her pale, suffering face. The theme is the hypocrisy of a society which allows sexual freedom for men but prohibition for women, which would be a key preoccupation over the next decade.

It's actually exactly the same story as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but with a happy ending! And it's that spectacular climax which stays in the memory, with Gish swept away in the ice floes of a frozen river. It's a long film. The comedy is a little homespun, but the drama is harrowing and engaging and Lillian breaks your heart a dozen different ways before the fade out. 

Lavish historical epic set in the French Revolution. It failed at the box office, maybe due to its lengthy and complicated narrative. This is further confused by DW Griffith's position on the uprising; it was made four years after the Russian revolution and is primarily anti-Bolshevik propaganda. By the climax it feels like the aristocrats prevailed!

The films of Griffith and Lillian Gish were out of fashion by 1921. The title came to stand for the excesses of Victorian melodrama. But this succeeds as a spectacle. The recreation of Paris is magnificent. The cast of extras is vast and the costumes are fabulous. Griffith manoeuvres Gish into another cliffhanger every 10 minutes and disentangles her at the last possible moment.

This works because the director is so good at suspense, and Lillian Gish such an immense screen presence. She transcends the classic archetype of early cinema; a virtuous woman who must suffer because the world is hostile, but who is rewarded for her purity.

Griffith doesn't frame Gish in close-up as much as usual. She is in long shot, a fragment trapped in the whirlwind of events. Inevitably the film builds to Lillian on the guillotine with Danton riding to the rescue! As melodrama it is formulaic, though entertaining. As history it is bunk. But as a spectacle and a vehicle for Lillian's immortal fragility, it is a triumph. 

The classic three act structure of the heist film- preparation-execution-disintegration- is the frame for a study of the conflict between three men who bust into a bank in upstate New York. Ed Begley is an ex-cop looking for a payoff to set him straight after a stretch. He recruits an unlucky gambler in hock to the mob (Harry Belafonte) and a volatile redneck no-mark (Robert Ryan).

See the problem! The ongoing racial war dooms the caper. There is plenty of raw, unsubtle symbolism. The gang face off on adjacent petrol tanks and literally blow each other up, leaving charred corpses which can't be distinguished. Though this sounds simplistic, the situations are complex and interesting.

It's an ensemble film. Ryan is compelling as another of his combustable, stubborn bigots. Gloria Grahame is memorable in a cameo as a dumb, overripe tease. Harry Belafonte produced and he gives himself an elegant blues song.  Its unique atmosphere is also due to a fantastic cool-jazz soundtrack by the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Best of all is the phenomenal photography. This is visual art and one of the great picture books of New York. It has an expressionist look, not because of the sets, or lighting, but the distorting effect of the lens. It's one many classic genre films Robert Wise directed before he made blockbusters. Beyond its noirish fatalism, this is pure arthouse. 

Gorgeous late period film noir with the familiar scenario of a vulnerable woman terrorised by a menacing, unknown male assassin. Lee Remick is a bank worker who lives with her school age sister (Stefanie Powers). An assailant who can only be identified by his asthmatic breathing says they will be brutally murdered unless the clerk robs her employer of $100,000. And don't tell the cops.

She immediately calls the FBI… and Glenn Ford throws a huge team behind her protection, which climaxes with the wheezy psycho gunned down on the outfield of the LA Dodgers. So the first casualty of the investigation is logic.

It's incredible that the bureau would commit extensive, round the clock resources to the protection of a single tax payer for a crime that hasn't happened. And it's implausible that the maniac who threatens to kill her if she tells a single person, and has her entire life staked out, doesn't notice there are a dozen G Men watching every move 

Unfortunately this also undermines the suspense as it makes the stalker a bit of an idiot. However, the b&w photography is a knockout with cool camera set ups and impressive locations (including the set piece at Candlestick Park). It never gets as tense as promised in the early scenes but this is still an entertaining thriller with attractive stars.

Sam Fuller took the Hollywood gangster film to Tokyo and transformed its classic b&w expressionism into glorious Technicolor. It is a remake of the 1948 film noir, The Street With No Name. Robert Stack goes undercover in occupied Japan to infiltrate a gang of former US soldiers who have established a syndicate.

While the film is staged against a backdrop of national regeneration, it isn't political. It captures Japan in the spasm of great change, but its vision is more touristic. There's a fabulous lingering shot of Mount Fuji. There's the Imperial Hotel, and an exciting (Hitchcock influenced) finale on the rooftop of the Tokyo Amusement Park.

The mob is led by Robert Ryan, who has the hoodlum's customary vanity; his gunmen wear some amazing suits and are as stylish as any screen gang, ever. He has an unmissable homosexual relationship with a sidekick, which makes a deeper impact than the tepid inter-racial romance between Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi. Both were contrary to the production code.

This doesn't have the energy or scuzzy underworld scenarios typical of Fuller. It wasn't a project he initiated, or his screenplay. But there are some stunning locations and camera setups and a fair amount of suspense. It wasn't the first colour crime film of the '50s, but the striking use of CinemaScope makes it groundbreaking and he adapts the technology with flair. 

Buster Keaton had no regard for this silent romantic comedy, maybe because he didn’t originate the project. It is adapted from an old stage play (by Roi Cooper Megrue) which is more like the director/star’s early features. But it’s grand entertainment and was a huge success.

Buster plays a lawyer faced with financial ruin who will inherit $7 million if he gets married before 7pm… the same day! When his neglected girlfriend turns him down, the would-be heir enquires after the other seven women he knows… and finally advertises.

Until he is chased across town by hundreds of potential brides. Which admittedly is a run out for being pursued through LA by a herd of cattle in his other 1925 release, Go West. Famously Keaton ends up fleeing a rockslide. Some critics are dismissive because it’s not- apparently- the work of an auteur!

But it’s excellent; both the rather conventional romcom and the frantic action climax. It’s crammed with superb visual gags and Keaton relates the satisfying narrative with clarity. There are even scenes in Technicolor! Don’t miss uncredited Jean Arthur on the switchboard, sporting a black bob… 

Loose adaptation of an early novel by Georges Simenon, which would be remade with some success as Monsieur Hire in 1989. The attraction for Julien Duvivier in 1946 was the portrayal of mob mentality which reflects the improvised law of France in the months after WWII.

So Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) is fitted up by his neighbours as the killer of a lonely spinster, purely because he is unpopular and different. This subplot unfortunately squeezes out the stronger theme of his voyeuristic obsession with a woman just released from prison (Viviane Romance).

 And she unconditionally loves the real murderer (Paul Bernard). Anyone used to Hollywood crime films will be struck by how sleazy this is. The Production Code wouldn’t permit the assassin’s impassive revelation of utterly sordid sociopathy. Or the futility of the law… Or the post coital intimacy of the degenerate lovers.

Michel Simon is ideal casting as the resolute, deviant misfit. And there’s the eccentric community of sex workers, bumptious minor officials and ineffectual petit bourgeoisie standard in French crime pictures. This feels like the poetic realism of the ’30s. War is over but an ambient pessimism still hangs over the city, like fog. 

Sensitive, melancholy reflection on the social revolution in Japan after WWII; particularly related to the changing status of women. This was a common theme in the period, but rarely dramatised with such poignancy.

Kinuyuo Tanaka plays the last of a declining dynasty of long ago aristocrats holding onto her small plot of land. She and her young cousin (Akihito Katayama) cling to this vanishing sense of tradition and order, while others exploit the permissiveness of the new laws and westernised moral code.

Her property is inexorably swept up in the expansion of Tokyo. She no longer belongs in the new society. Sometimes this feels like melodrama. And then, tragedy. Admittedly, an appreciation of this scenario depends on an interest in the postwar reconstruction of Japan…

Or at least empathy for the vulnerability and isolation of women throughout history… Still this is a film by Kenji Mizoguchi and is elevated by the poetry of his visual style and command of the cinematic art. Just on a sensual level, this is a rare, exotic experience. 

This is adapted from a Theodore Dreiser novel set in the US at the turn of the 20th century, though without the political bite. It follows a riches to rags story arc more typical of depression era melodrama. But its great director, WIlliam Wyler, elevates the material somewhere closer to tragedy.

Jennifer Jones in the title role plays a country girl who moves to Chicago and starts a disastrous affair with a middle aged man (Laurence Olivier) who steals and commits bigamy to keep her. They escape to New York where they live in poverty. The star was a very beautiful woman, so it's easy to accept the obsession of the man who destroys himself for her. 

But she was also a limited actor and is eclipsed by Olivier, who performs wonders with a dreadful archetype; trapped in a midlife crisis and a loveless marriage, desperate for another chance. There are fascinating thematic complications, with Carrie utterly dependant on mediocre men, and harmed by pointless social conventions.  

The film benefits from Wyler's intelligent visual storytelling. He fills the frame with fascinating detail. It's a prestigious production with excellent sets and costumes. The Production Code means there is too little anger on screen, but it is still pessimistic about the myth of the American dream.